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Month: May 2013

Earthquakes that last minutes rather than seconds are a relatively recent discovery, according to an international team of seismologists. Researchers have been aware of these slow earthquakes, only for the past five to 10 years because of new tools and new observations, but these tools may explain the triggering of some normal earthquakes and could help in earthquake prediction.

“New technology has shown us that faults do not just fail in a sudden earthquake or by stable creep,” said Demian M. Saffer, professor of geoscience, Penn State. “We now know that earthquakes with anomalous low frequencies — slow earthquakes — and slow slip events that take weeks to occur exist.”

These new observations have put a big wrinkle into our thinking about how faults work, according to the researchers who also include Chris Marone, professor of geosciences, Penn State; Matt J. Ikari, recent Ph.D. recipient, and Achim J. Kopf, former Penn State postdoctural fellow, both now at the University of Bremen, Germany. So far, no one has explained the processes that cause slow earthquakes.

The researchers thought that the behavior had to be related to the type of rock in the fault, believing that clay minerals are important in this slip behavior to see how the rocks reacted. Ikari performed laboratory experiments using natural samples from drilling done offshore of Japan in a place where slow earthquakes occur. The samples came from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, an international collaborative. The researchers reported their results recently in Nature Geoscience.

These samples are made up of ocean sediment that is mostly clay with a little quartz.

“Usually, when you shear clay-rich fault rocks in the laboratory in the way rocks are sheared in a fault, as the speed increases, the rocks become stronger and self arrests the movement,” said Saffer. “Matt noticed another behavior. Initially the rocks reacted as expected, but these clays got weaker as they slid further. They initially became slightly stronger as the slip rate increased, but then, over the long run, they became weaker.

The laboratory experiments that produced the largest effect closely matched the velocity at which slow earthquakes occur in nature. The researchers also found that water content in the clays influenced how the shear occurred.

“From the physics of earthquake nucleation based on the laboratory experiments we would predict the size of the patch of fault that breaks at tens of meters,” said Saffer. “The consistent result for the rates of slip and the velocity of slip in the lab are interesting. Lots of things point in the direction for this to be the solution.”

The researchers worry about slow earthquakes because there is evidence that swarms of low frequency events can trigger large earthquake events. In Japan, a combination of broadband seismometers and global positioning system devices can monitor slow earthquakes.

For the Japanese and others in earthquake prone areas, a few days of foreknowledge of a potential earthquake hazard could be valuable and save lives.

For slow slip events, collecting natural samples for laboratory experiments is more difficult because the faults where these take place are very deep. Only off the north shore of New Zealand is there a fault that can be sampled. Saffer is currently working to arrange a drilling expedition to that fault.

Earthquakes that last minutes rather than seconds are a relatively recent discovery, according to an international team of seismologists. Researchers have been aware of these slow earthquakes, only for the past five to 10 years because of new tools and new observations, but these tools may explain the triggering of some normal earthquakes and could help in earthquake prediction.

“New technology has shown us that faults do not just fail in a sudden earthquake or by stable creep,” said Demian M. Saffer, professor of geoscience, Penn State. “We now know that earthquakes with anomalous low frequencies — slow earthquakes — and slow slip events that take weeks to occur exist.”

These new observations have put a big wrinkle into our thinking about how faults work, according to the researchers who also include Chris Marone, professor of geosciences, Penn State; Matt J. Ikari, recent Ph.D. recipient, and Achim J. Kopf, former Penn State postdoctural fellow, both now at the University of Bremen, Germany. So far, no one has explained the processes that cause slow earthquakes.

The researchers thought that the behavior had to be related to the type of rock in the fault, believing that clay minerals are important in this slip behavior to see how the rocks reacted. Ikari performed laboratory experiments using natural samples from drilling done offshore of Japan in a place where slow earthquakes occur. The samples came from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, an international collaborative. The researchers reported their results recently in Nature Geoscience.

These samples are made up of ocean sediment that is mostly clay with a little quartz.

“Usually, when you shear clay-rich fault rocks in the laboratory in the way rocks are sheared in a fault, as the speed increases, the rocks become stronger and self arrests the movement,” said Saffer. “Matt noticed another behavior. Initially the rocks reacted as expected, but these clays got weaker as they slid further. They initially became slightly stronger as the slip rate increased, but then, over the long run, they became weaker.

The laboratory experiments that produced the largest effect closely matched the velocity at which slow earthquakes occur in nature. The researchers also found that water content in the clays influenced how the shear occurred.

“From the physics of earthquake nucleation based on the laboratory experiments we would predict the size of the patch of fault that breaks at tens of meters,” said Saffer. “The consistent result for the rates of slip and the velocity of slip in the lab are interesting. Lots of things point in the direction for this to be the solution.”

The researchers worry about slow earthquakes because there is evidence that swarms of low frequency events can trigger large earthquake events. In Japan, a combination of broadband seismometers and global positioning system devices can monitor slow earthquakes.

For the Japanese and others in earthquake prone areas, a few days of foreknowledge of a potential earthquake hazard could be valuable and save lives.

For slow slip events, collecting natural samples for laboratory experiments is more difficult because the faults where these take place are very deep. Only off the north shore of New Zealand is there a fault that can be sampled. Saffer is currently working to arrange a drilling expedition to that fault.

UWM geosciences professor John Isbell (left) and postdoctoral researcher Erik Gulbranson, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, look over some of the many samples they have brought back from Antarctica. The two are part of an international team of scientists investigating the last extreme climate shift on Earth, which occurred in the late Paleozoic Era. – Troye Fox

What happened the last time a vegetated Earth shifted from an extremely cold climate to desert-like conditions? And what does it tell us about climate change today?

John Isbell is on a quest to coax that information from the geology of the southernmost portions of the Earth. It won’t be easy, because the last transition from “icehouse to greenhouse” occurred between 335 and 290 million years ago.

An expert in glaciation from the late Paleozoic Era, Isbell is challenging many assumptions about the way drastic climate change naturally unfolds. The research helps form the all-important baseline needed to predict what the added effects of human activity will bring.

Starting from ‘deep freeze’

In the late Paleozoic, the modern continents were fused together into two huge land masses, with what is now the Southern Hemisphere, including Antarctica, called Gondwana.

During the span of more than 60 million years, Gondwana shifted from a state of deep freeze into one so hot and dry it supported the appearance of reptiles. The change, however, didn’t happen uniformly, Isbell says.

In fact, his research has shaken the common belief that Gondwana was covered by one massive sheet of ice which gradually and steadily melted away as conditions warmed.

Isbell has found that at least 22 individual ice sheets were located in various places over the region. And the state of glaciation during the long warming period was marked by dramatic swings in temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels.

“There appears to be a direct association between low CO2 levels and glaciation,” he says. “A lot of the changes in greenhouse gases and in a shrinking ice volume then are similar to what we’re seeing today.”

When the ice finally started disappearing, he says, it did so in the polar regions first and lingered in other parts of Gondwana with higher elevations. He attributes that to different conditions across Gondwana, such as mountain-building events, which would have preserved glaciers longer.

All about the carbon

To get an accurate picture of the range of conditions in the late Paleozoic, Isbell has traveled to Antarctica 16 times and has joined colleagues from around the world as part of an interdisciplinary team funded by the National Science Foundation. They have regularly gone to places where no one has ever walked on the rocks before.

One of his colleagues is paleoecologist Erik Gulbranson, who studies plant communities from the tail end of the Paleozoic and how they evolved in concert with the climatic changes. The information contained in fossil soil and plants, he says, can reveal a lot about carbon cycling, which is so central for applying the work to climate change today.

Documenting the particulars of how the carbon cycle behaved so long ago will allow them to answer questions like, ‘What was the main force behind glaciation during the late Paleozoic? Was it mountain-building or climate change?’

Another characteristic of the late Paleozoic shift is that once the climate warmed significantly and atmospheric CO2 levels soared, the Earth’s climate remained hot and dry for another 200 million years.

“These natural cycles are very long, and that’s an important difference with what we’re seeing with the contemporary global climate change,” says Gulbranson. “Today, we’re seeing change in greenhouse gas concentrations of CO2 on the order of centuries and decades.”

Ancient trees and soil

In order to explain today’s accelerated warming, Gulbranson’s research illustrates that glaciers alone don’t tell the whole story.

Many environmental factors leave an imprint on the carbon contained in tree trunks from this period. One of the things Gulbranson hypothesizes from his research in Antarctica is that an increase in deciduous trees occurred in higher latitudes during the late Paleozoic, driven by higher temperatures.

What he doesn’t yet know is what the net effect was on the carbon cycle.

While trees soak in CO2 and give off oxygen, there are other environmental processes to consider, says Gulbranson. For example, CO2 emissions also come from soil as microbes speed up their consumption of organic matter with rising temperatures.

“The high latitudes today contain the largest amount of carbon locked up as organic material and permafrost soils on Earth today,” he says. “It actually exceeds the amount of carbon you can measure in the rain forests. So what happens to that stockpile of carbon when you warm it and grow a forest over it is completely unknown.”

Another unknown is whether the Northern Hemisphere during this time was also glaciated and warming. The pair are about to find out. With UWM backing, they will do field work in northeastern Russia this summer to study glacial deposits from the late Paleozoic.

The two scientists’ work is complementary. Dating the rock is essential to pinpointing the rate of change in the carbon cycle, which would be the warning signal we could use today to indicate that nature is becoming dangerously unbalanced.

“If we figure out what happened with the glaciers,” says Isbell, “and add it to what we know about other conditions – we will be able to unlock the answers to climate change.”

UWM geosciences professor John Isbell (left) and postdoctoral researcher Erik Gulbranson, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, look over some of the many samples they have brought back from Antarctica. The two are part of an international team of scientists investigating the last extreme climate shift on Earth, which occurred in the late Paleozoic Era. – Troye Fox

What happened the last time a vegetated Earth shifted from an extremely cold climate to desert-like conditions? And what does it tell us about climate change today?

John Isbell is on a quest to coax that information from the geology of the southernmost portions of the Earth. It won’t be easy, because the last transition from “icehouse to greenhouse” occurred between 335 and 290 million years ago.

An expert in glaciation from the late Paleozoic Era, Isbell is challenging many assumptions about the way drastic climate change naturally unfolds. The research helps form the all-important baseline needed to predict what the added effects of human activity will bring.

Starting from ‘deep freeze’

In the late Paleozoic, the modern continents were fused together into two huge land masses, with what is now the Southern Hemisphere, including Antarctica, called Gondwana.

During the span of more than 60 million years, Gondwana shifted from a state of deep freeze into one so hot and dry it supported the appearance of reptiles. The change, however, didn’t happen uniformly, Isbell says.

In fact, his research has shaken the common belief that Gondwana was covered by one massive sheet of ice which gradually and steadily melted away as conditions warmed.

Isbell has found that at least 22 individual ice sheets were located in various places over the region. And the state of glaciation during the long warming period was marked by dramatic swings in temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels.

“There appears to be a direct association between low CO2 levels and glaciation,” he says. “A lot of the changes in greenhouse gases and in a shrinking ice volume then are similar to what we’re seeing today.”

When the ice finally started disappearing, he says, it did so in the polar regions first and lingered in other parts of Gondwana with higher elevations. He attributes that to different conditions across Gondwana, such as mountain-building events, which would have preserved glaciers longer.

All about the carbon

To get an accurate picture of the range of conditions in the late Paleozoic, Isbell has traveled to Antarctica 16 times and has joined colleagues from around the world as part of an interdisciplinary team funded by the National Science Foundation. They have regularly gone to places where no one has ever walked on the rocks before.

One of his colleagues is paleoecologist Erik Gulbranson, who studies plant communities from the tail end of the Paleozoic and how they evolved in concert with the climatic changes. The information contained in fossil soil and plants, he says, can reveal a lot about carbon cycling, which is so central for applying the work to climate change today.

Documenting the particulars of how the carbon cycle behaved so long ago will allow them to answer questions like, ‘What was the main force behind glaciation during the late Paleozoic? Was it mountain-building or climate change?’

Another characteristic of the late Paleozoic shift is that once the climate warmed significantly and atmospheric CO2 levels soared, the Earth’s climate remained hot and dry for another 200 million years.

“These natural cycles are very long, and that’s an important difference with what we’re seeing with the contemporary global climate change,” says Gulbranson. “Today, we’re seeing change in greenhouse gas concentrations of CO2 on the order of centuries and decades.”

Ancient trees and soil

In order to explain today’s accelerated warming, Gulbranson’s research illustrates that glaciers alone don’t tell the whole story.

Many environmental factors leave an imprint on the carbon contained in tree trunks from this period. One of the things Gulbranson hypothesizes from his research in Antarctica is that an increase in deciduous trees occurred in higher latitudes during the late Paleozoic, driven by higher temperatures.

What he doesn’t yet know is what the net effect was on the carbon cycle.

While trees soak in CO2 and give off oxygen, there are other environmental processes to consider, says Gulbranson. For example, CO2 emissions also come from soil as microbes speed up their consumption of organic matter with rising temperatures.

“The high latitudes today contain the largest amount of carbon locked up as organic material and permafrost soils on Earth today,” he says. “It actually exceeds the amount of carbon you can measure in the rain forests. So what happens to that stockpile of carbon when you warm it and grow a forest over it is completely unknown.”

Another unknown is whether the Northern Hemisphere during this time was also glaciated and warming. The pair are about to find out. With UWM backing, they will do field work in northeastern Russia this summer to study glacial deposits from the late Paleozoic.

The two scientists’ work is complementary. Dating the rock is essential to pinpointing the rate of change in the carbon cycle, which would be the warning signal we could use today to indicate that nature is becoming dangerously unbalanced.

“If we figure out what happened with the glaciers,” says Isbell, “and add it to what we know about other conditions – we will be able to unlock the answers to climate change.”

The massive ball of iron sitting at the center of Earth is not quite as “rock-solid” as has been thought, say two Stanford mineral physicists. By conducting experiments that simulate the immense pressures deep in the planet’s interior, the researchers determined that iron in Earth’s inner core is only about 40 percent as strong as previous studies estimated.

This is the first time scientists have been able to experimentally measure the effect of such intense pressure – as high as 3 million times the pressure Earth’s atmosphere exerts at sea level – in a laboratory. A paper presenting the results of their study is available online in Nature Geoscience.

“The strength of iron under these extreme pressures is startlingly weak,” said Arianna Gleason, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, and lead author of the paper. Wendy Mao, an assistant professor in the department, is the co-author.

“This strength measurement can help us understand how the core deforms over long time scales, which influences how we think about Earth’s evolution and planetary evolution in general,” Gleason said.

Until now, almost all of what is known about Earth’s inner core came from studies tracking seismic waves as they travel from the surface of the planet through the interior. Those studies have shown that the travel time through the inner core isn’t the same in every direction, indicating that the inner core itself is not uniform. Over time and subjected to great pressure, the core has developed a sort of fabric as grains of iron elongate and align lengthwise in parallel formations.

The ease and speed with which iron grains in the inner core can deform and align would have influenced the evolution of the early Earth and development of the geomagnetic field. The field is generated by the circulation of liquid iron in the outer core around the solid inner core and shields Earth from the full intensity of solar radiation. Without the geomagnetic field, life – at least as we know it – would not be possible on Earth.

“The development of the inner core would certainly have some effect on the geomagnetic field, but just what effect and the magnitude of the effect, we can’t say,” said Mao. “That is very speculative.”

Gleason and Mao conducted their experiments using a diamond anvil cell – a device that can exert immense pressure on tiny samples clenched between two diamonds. They subjected minute amounts of pure iron to pressures between 200 and 300 gigapascals (equivalent to the pressure of 2 million to 3 million Earth atmospheres). Previous experimental studies were conducted in the range of only 10 gigapascals.

“We really pushed the limit here in terms of experimental conditions,” Gleason said. “Pioneering advancements in pressure-generation techniques and improvements in detector sensitivity, for example, used at large X-ray synchrotron facilities, such as Argonne National Lab, have allowed us to make these new measurements.”

In addition to intense pressures, the inner core also has extreme temperatures. The boundary between the inner and outer core has temperatures comparable to the surface of the sun. Simultaneously simulating both the pressure and temperature at the inner core isn’t yet possible in the laboratory, though Gleason and Mao are working on that for future studies. (For this study, Gleason mathematically extrapolated from their pressure data to factor in the effect of temperature.)

Gleason and Mao expect their findings will help other researchers set more realistic variables for conducting their own experiments.

“People modeling the inner core haven’t had many experimental constraints, because it’s so difficult to make measurements under those conditions,” Mao said. “There really weren’t constraints on how strong the core was, so this is really a fundamental new constraint.”

The massive ball of iron sitting at the center of Earth is not quite as “rock-solid” as has been thought, say two Stanford mineral physicists. By conducting experiments that simulate the immense pressures deep in the planet’s interior, the researchers determined that iron in Earth’s inner core is only about 40 percent as strong as previous studies estimated.

This is the first time scientists have been able to experimentally measure the effect of such intense pressure – as high as 3 million times the pressure Earth’s atmosphere exerts at sea level – in a laboratory. A paper presenting the results of their study is available online in Nature Geoscience.

“The strength of iron under these extreme pressures is startlingly weak,” said Arianna Gleason, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, and lead author of the paper. Wendy Mao, an assistant professor in the department, is the co-author.

“This strength measurement can help us understand how the core deforms over long time scales, which influences how we think about Earth’s evolution and planetary evolution in general,” Gleason said.

Until now, almost all of what is known about Earth’s inner core came from studies tracking seismic waves as they travel from the surface of the planet through the interior. Those studies have shown that the travel time through the inner core isn’t the same in every direction, indicating that the inner core itself is not uniform. Over time and subjected to great pressure, the core has developed a sort of fabric as grains of iron elongate and align lengthwise in parallel formations.

The ease and speed with which iron grains in the inner core can deform and align would have influenced the evolution of the early Earth and development of the geomagnetic field. The field is generated by the circulation of liquid iron in the outer core around the solid inner core and shields Earth from the full intensity of solar radiation. Without the geomagnetic field, life – at least as we know it – would not be possible on Earth.

“The development of the inner core would certainly have some effect on the geomagnetic field, but just what effect and the magnitude of the effect, we can’t say,” said Mao. “That is very speculative.”

Gleason and Mao conducted their experiments using a diamond anvil cell – a device that can exert immense pressure on tiny samples clenched between two diamonds. They subjected minute amounts of pure iron to pressures between 200 and 300 gigapascals (equivalent to the pressure of 2 million to 3 million Earth atmospheres). Previous experimental studies were conducted in the range of only 10 gigapascals.

“We really pushed the limit here in terms of experimental conditions,” Gleason said. “Pioneering advancements in pressure-generation techniques and improvements in detector sensitivity, for example, used at large X-ray synchrotron facilities, such as Argonne National Lab, have allowed us to make these new measurements.”

In addition to intense pressures, the inner core also has extreme temperatures. The boundary between the inner and outer core has temperatures comparable to the surface of the sun. Simultaneously simulating both the pressure and temperature at the inner core isn’t yet possible in the laboratory, though Gleason and Mao are working on that for future studies. (For this study, Gleason mathematically extrapolated from their pressure data to factor in the effect of temperature.)

Gleason and Mao expect their findings will help other researchers set more realistic variables for conducting their own experiments.

“People modeling the inner core haven’t had many experimental constraints, because it’s so difficult to make measurements under those conditions,” Mao said. “There really weren’t constraints on how strong the core was, so this is really a fundamental new constraint.”

The exposed Sunda Shelf during glacial times greatly affected the atmospheric circulation. The shelf is shown on the left for present-day as the light-blue submerged areas between Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and Thailand, and on the right for the last ice age as the green exposed area. – Pedro DiNezio

Scientists look at past climates to learn about climate change and the ability to simulate it with computer models. One region that has received a great deal of attention is the Indo-Pacific warm pool, the vast pool of warm water stretching along the equator from Africa to the western Pacific Ocean.

In a new study, Pedro DiNezio of the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Jessica Tierney of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution investigated preserved geological clues (called “proxies”) of rainfall patterns during the last ice age when the planet was dramatically colder than today. They compared these patterns with computer model simulations in order to find a physical explanation for the patterns inferred from the proxies.

Their study, which appears in the May 19, online edition of Nature Geoscience, not only reveals unique patterns of rainfall change over the Indo-Pacific warm pool, but also shows that they were caused by the effect of lowered sea level on the configuration of the Indonesian archipelago.

“For our research,” explains lead-author Pedro DiNezio at the International Pacific Research Center, “we compared the climate of the ice age with our recent warmer climate. We analyzed about 100 proxy records of rainfall and salinity stretching from the tropical western Pacific to the western Indian Ocean and eastern Africa. Rainfall and salinity signals recorded in geological sediments can tell us much about past changes in atmospheric circulation over land and the ocean respectively.”

“Our comparisons show that, as many scientists expected, much of the Indo-Pacific warm pool was drier during this glacial period compared with today. But, counter to some theories, several regions, such as the western Pacific and the western Indian Ocean, especially eastern Africa, were wetter,” adds co-author Jessica Tierney from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

In the second step, the scientists matched these rainfall and salinity patterns with simulations from 12 state-of-the-art climate models that are used to also predict future climate change. For this matching they applied a method of categorical data comparison called the ‘Cohen’s kappa’ statistic. Though widely used in the medical field, this method has not yet been used to match geological climate signals with climate model simulations.

“We were taken aback that only one model out of the 12 showed statistical agreement with the proxy-inferred patterns of the rainfall changes. This model, though, agrees well with both the rainfall and salinity indicators – two entirely independent sets of proxy data covering distinct areas of the tropics,” says DiNezio.

The model reveals that the dry climate during the glacial period was driven by reduced convection over a region of the warm pool called the Sunda Shelf. Today the shelf is submerged beneath the Gulf of Thailand, but was above sea level during the glacial period, when sea level was about 120 m lower.

“The exposure of the Sunda Shelf greatly weakened convection over the warm pool, with far-reaching impacts on the large-scale circulation and on rainfall patterns from Africa to the western Pacific and northern Australia,” explains DiNezio.

The main weakness of the other models, according to the authors, is their limited ability to simulate convection, the vertical air motions that lift humid air into the atmosphere. Differences in the way each model simulates convection may explain why the results for the glacial period are so different.

“Our research resolves a decades-old question of what the response of tropical climate was to glaciation,” concludes DiNezio. “The study, moreover, presents a fine benchmark for assessing the ability of climate models to simulate the response of tropical convection to altered land masses and global temperatures.

The exposed Sunda Shelf during glacial times greatly affected the atmospheric circulation. The shelf is shown on the left for present-day as the light-blue submerged areas between Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and Thailand, and on the right for the last ice age as the green exposed area. – Pedro DiNezio

Scientists look at past climates to learn about climate change and the ability to simulate it with computer models. One region that has received a great deal of attention is the Indo-Pacific warm pool, the vast pool of warm water stretching along the equator from Africa to the western Pacific Ocean.

In a new study, Pedro DiNezio of the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Jessica Tierney of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution investigated preserved geological clues (called “proxies”) of rainfall patterns during the last ice age when the planet was dramatically colder than today. They compared these patterns with computer model simulations in order to find a physical explanation for the patterns inferred from the proxies.

Their study, which appears in the May 19, online edition of Nature Geoscience, not only reveals unique patterns of rainfall change over the Indo-Pacific warm pool, but also shows that they were caused by the effect of lowered sea level on the configuration of the Indonesian archipelago.

“For our research,” explains lead-author Pedro DiNezio at the International Pacific Research Center, “we compared the climate of the ice age with our recent warmer climate. We analyzed about 100 proxy records of rainfall and salinity stretching from the tropical western Pacific to the western Indian Ocean and eastern Africa. Rainfall and salinity signals recorded in geological sediments can tell us much about past changes in atmospheric circulation over land and the ocean respectively.”

“Our comparisons show that, as many scientists expected, much of the Indo-Pacific warm pool was drier during this glacial period compared with today. But, counter to some theories, several regions, such as the western Pacific and the western Indian Ocean, especially eastern Africa, were wetter,” adds co-author Jessica Tierney from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

In the second step, the scientists matched these rainfall and salinity patterns with simulations from 12 state-of-the-art climate models that are used to also predict future climate change. For this matching they applied a method of categorical data comparison called the ‘Cohen’s kappa’ statistic. Though widely used in the medical field, this method has not yet been used to match geological climate signals with climate model simulations.

“We were taken aback that only one model out of the 12 showed statistical agreement with the proxy-inferred patterns of the rainfall changes. This model, though, agrees well with both the rainfall and salinity indicators – two entirely independent sets of proxy data covering distinct areas of the tropics,” says DiNezio.

The model reveals that the dry climate during the glacial period was driven by reduced convection over a region of the warm pool called the Sunda Shelf. Today the shelf is submerged beneath the Gulf of Thailand, but was above sea level during the glacial period, when sea level was about 120 m lower.

“The exposure of the Sunda Shelf greatly weakened convection over the warm pool, with far-reaching impacts on the large-scale circulation and on rainfall patterns from Africa to the western Pacific and northern Australia,” explains DiNezio.

The main weakness of the other models, according to the authors, is their limited ability to simulate convection, the vertical air motions that lift humid air into the atmosphere. Differences in the way each model simulates convection may explain why the results for the glacial period are so different.

“Our research resolves a decades-old question of what the response of tropical climate was to glaciation,” concludes DiNezio. “The study, moreover, presents a fine benchmark for assessing the ability of climate models to simulate the response of tropical convection to altered land masses and global temperatures.

The distortion of the ancient shoreline and flooding surface of the U.S. Atlantic Coastal Plain are the direct result of fluctuations in topography in the region and could have implications on understanding long-term climate change, according to a new study.

Sedimentary rocks from Virginia through Florida show marine flooding during the mid-Pliocene Epoch, which correlates to approximately 4 million years ago. Several wave-cut scarps, (rock exposures) which originally would have been horizontal, are now draped over a warped surface with up to 60 meters variation.

Nathan Simmons of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and colleagues from the University of Chicago, Université du Québec à Montréal, Syracuse University, Harvard University and the University of Texas at Austin modeled the active topography using mantle convection simulations that predict the amplitude and broad spatial distribution of this distortion. The results imply that dynamic topography and, to a lesser extent, glacial adjustment, account for the current architecture of the coastal plain and nearby shelf.

The results appear in the May 16 edition of Science Express, and will appear at a later date in Science Magazine,

“Our simulations of dynamic topography of the Eastern Seaboard have implications for inferences of global long-term sea-level change,” Simmons said.

The eastern coast of the United States is considered an archetypal Atlantic-type or passive-type continental margin.

“The highlight is that mantle flow is a major component in distorting the Earth’s surface over geologic time, even in so-called ‘passive’ continental margins,” Simmons said. “Reconstructing long-term global sea-level change based on stratigraphic relations must account for this effect. In other words, did the water level change or did the ground move? This could have implications on understanding very long-term climate change.”

The mantle is not a passive player in determining long-term sea level changes. Mantle flow influences surface topography, through perturbations of the dynamic topography, in a manner that varies both spatially and temporally. As a result, it is it difficult to invert for the global long-term sea level signal and, in turn, the size of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, using east coast shoreline data.

Simmons said the new results provide another powerful piece of evidence that mantle flow is intimately involved in shaping the Earth’s surface and must be considered when attempting to unravel numerous long-term Earth processes such as sea-level variations over millions of years.

The distortion of the ancient shoreline and flooding surface of the U.S. Atlantic Coastal Plain are the direct result of fluctuations in topography in the region and could have implications on understanding long-term climate change, according to a new study.

Sedimentary rocks from Virginia through Florida show marine flooding during the mid-Pliocene Epoch, which correlates to approximately 4 million years ago. Several wave-cut scarps, (rock exposures) which originally would have been horizontal, are now draped over a warped surface with up to 60 meters variation.

Nathan Simmons of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and colleagues from the University of Chicago, Université du Québec à Montréal, Syracuse University, Harvard University and the University of Texas at Austin modeled the active topography using mantle convection simulations that predict the amplitude and broad spatial distribution of this distortion. The results imply that dynamic topography and, to a lesser extent, glacial adjustment, account for the current architecture of the coastal plain and nearby shelf.

The results appear in the May 16 edition of Science Express, and will appear at a later date in Science Magazine,

“Our simulations of dynamic topography of the Eastern Seaboard have implications for inferences of global long-term sea-level change,” Simmons said.

The eastern coast of the United States is considered an archetypal Atlantic-type or passive-type continental margin.

“The highlight is that mantle flow is a major component in distorting the Earth’s surface over geologic time, even in so-called ‘passive’ continental margins,” Simmons said. “Reconstructing long-term global sea-level change based on stratigraphic relations must account for this effect. In other words, did the water level change or did the ground move? This could have implications on understanding very long-term climate change.”

The mantle is not a passive player in determining long-term sea level changes. Mantle flow influences surface topography, through perturbations of the dynamic topography, in a manner that varies both spatially and temporally. As a result, it is it difficult to invert for the global long-term sea level signal and, in turn, the size of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, using east coast shoreline data.

Simmons said the new results provide another powerful piece of evidence that mantle flow is intimately involved in shaping the Earth’s surface and must be considered when attempting to unravel numerous long-term Earth processes such as sea-level variations over millions of years.